Gary Corn
With little fanfare, the traditional line between public and private war was just blurred yet again. Israel’s intense air strikes against Iran—capped off by the U.S. Operation Midnight Hammer—has understandably garnered the lion’s share of attention. Yet a significant cyber component of the conflict has flown somewhat under the radar. According to multiple sources, “hackers, patriotic hacktivists, online propagandists and opportunistic cybercriminals” somehow “linked” to both Iran and Israel were actively targeting the opposing sides throughout the so-called 12-Day War.
This should come as no surprise. Iran and Israel are both sophisticated cyber actors and have been exchanging cyber fires for years—directly and through proxies—including sabotage operations involving destructive physical effects (see e.g., here and here). Given the intensely adversarial relationship between Iran and Israel over many decades that has cycled through periods of escalation, covert proxy-conflict, and open warfare, much of this hostile cyber activity has taken place in the proverbial gray zone—what one Articles of War author aptly described as “that messy middle between war and peace” (see also, e.g., here and here)—defying easy characterization under international law.
In contrast, the current spate of hostile cyber activity has occurred in the context of and in relation to open warfare, where the applicability of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) offers, at least in theory, a greater degree of legal certainty. However, given the character of many of the actors engaged in these operations, and the nature of the operations themselves, it can be said that they are operating in the margins of LOAC, where legal uncertainty still predominates.
While one would expect that Israel and Iran have both leveraged organic cyber capabilities to conduct operations directly, for obvious reasons there is scant reporting available to confirm this. What has emerged is evidence of numerous independent, or perhaps loosely State-affiliated groups conducting a range of cyber operations, from espionage to information operations to disruptive and destructive effects operations against one side or the other of the conflict.
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